Blog: The Opening Ceremony Had Something for Everybody, Except Me

I'm aware that there is probably no worse way to judge an Olympics opening ceremony than by watching it without sound on the television down at the Laurel Tavern in between bites of cheeseburgers and sips of Newcastle brown ale. On the other hand, one's expectation of a large-scale, choreographed event held before 80,000 people in a three-tiered stadium is that its themes will be instantly recognizable from the cheap seats, including the ones at the Laurel, even with the sound off.

No way. This one was a true nightmare, a huge swirling cauldron of cloned Mary Poppinses, coal miners from the west Midlands trudging on well-worn paths down a mountainside, foppish men in top hats, nurses tending to a couple hundred kids in hospital beds, smokestacks surging from the stadium's darkest recesses, and various other visions surging from Danny Boyle's darkest recesses. And that was a good hour before an interminable Mr. Bean sequence gave way to an interminable Freddie Mercury sequence. What this had to do with athletics I will never know.

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